Why You Must Not Vote for Donald Trump

My great concern about Donald Trump is not so much his general loose-cannon attitude, which is bad enough. What seriously worries me is his lack of actual policy thought, which conflicts with his say-whatever-he-thinks-will-win approach. His personal platform is that it would be good to be President, and that's where it ends.

So, while Trump is out cutting ribbons and trying to bully foreign leaders, the country will be run by "Tea Party" Pence, and a probable Republican Congress lead by Paul Ryan. All they need to do is the minimum necessary to stroke Trump's ego, and they can ramrod through the entirety of the hideously regressive Republican Party platform. Just look at what Ryan has been proposing for budgets for the past few terms and you will see what we will be getting.

Sure, the Congress will pass a law authorizing Trump's Wall. Then, they spend the next four years arguing about how to fund it (assuming cooler heads prevail and Congress doesn't actually want to initiate an economic war with Mexico by expropriating Mexican assets or something staggeringly stupid like that).

Meanwhile, The Duce-er, The Donald-will happily sign all the legislation Ryan and co. send him, which will essentially turn the clock back to 1890. The Affordable Care Act will be repealed and replaced with nothing. Medicare will get privatized and replaced with a clumsy and ineffective voucher system. Social Security will get privatized and turned over to the same geniuses that brought us the crash of 2008, so that they can suck off a cut of the trust funds. Any attempts at campaign finance reform will be dead.

The National Labor Relations Board and unions generally will be on the chopping block. You can expect a national "right to work" law and other actions intent on destroying worker's rights and workplace protections. Any consumer protections like Dodd-Frank or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will be scrapped.Women's rights, LGBT rights, any kind of minority protections will go right down the tubes. Inequality will be sanctified and enshrined as the "American Way." Essentially, by the end of a Trump term, the only people who will legally matter will be well-off white, Protestant, straight males who are native-born citizens. Even though technically I fit into this demographic, I find these aims "deplorable."

We can expect the EPA and the Departments of Energy and Education to be neutered if not dismantled entirely. The first two are consistent with the return to "Robber Baron" days, when a man could do what he liked with his property and hang the consequences, and any neighbors without money enough to bring a private lawsuit could go hang, too.

Social conservatives have been waging war on public schools ever since school prayer was banned, and taking down any attempts to have national educational standards will accelerate the further degradation of public school systems and funneling money into private or religious schools that are free to teach backward doctrines like "creation science," abstinence-only sexual education (if any at all--), and the supremacy of the white race*. Publicly funded universities will essentially become technical schools that produce no inconvenient research. NASA and other government agencies that report unwanted findings about climate change, pollution, bad drugs, or you name it, will be muzzled, censored, or defunded.

So, if there is a Trump presidency, we will have the Republican idea of "small government"-which means that teachers, doctors, scientists, regulators, and social programs will go by the board, while the military, spies, and police have all the money they could wish for.

This is not making America great again, unless your idea of great was Grover Cleveland's second term (1893-1897). This is not the America we live in now, nor, I think, is it the America we want for the future.

(* The myopically racist books of 19th Century historical novelist G.A. Henty, author of With Lee in Virginia, among others, are recommended by, and, not coincidentally, kept in print and for sale by conservative home-schooling advocates.)